Where did it all go wrong?

Katie Owen reviews The Love Secrets of Don Juan by Tim Lott

By Katie Owen

12:00AM GMT 09 Mar 2003

Tim Lott's new novel is about a 45-year-old man going through a divorce. On his therapist's advice, he embarks on a course of introspection for the first time in his life. The aim is to find out where he went wrong in his relationships with women, starting with his first sexual experience at 13 in the early 1970s.

The structural concept of a man retracing his romantic life immediately recalls Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. There is a similarity, too, in that the confessional narrator seems to bear a very strong resemblance to the author himself. But the big difference is that Hornby's novel was laugh-out-loud funny, while Lott's is bitter, self-pitying and therefore painful to read.

Lott tries to distance himself from his narrator, Daniel Savage, but the relationship is too close for this to work - the self-ironising pose is only tenuously held. We are supposed to believe that for all his obtuseness, Daniel is basically a Nice Person - but we may not find this as easy to believe as one of the other characters, his long-faithful friend Carol, does.

Lott has a strong generalising tendency which is intrusive and which limits the possibilities of characterisation (all the women are cardboard cut-outs). As in his most recent novel, Rumours of a Hurricane, he likes to make his characters representative of their time, type and place. Here, he offers truisms about the differences between men and women. Women want relationships; men want sex. Women love bastards. Men don't talk to each other about their emotions. In the "post-feminist" age men are expected to act and talk more like women. Women think men are useless. And so on.

However, this is a very readable novel, with a high recognition factor and precise period detail. Like Hanif Kureishi, Lott writes pointedly about a man's experience of separation where a child is involved. His set-piece about Daniel and his ex-wife dividing up their possessions is moving and almost funny, and Daniel's words to his young daughter about her new life has a similar effect: "You've got two homes now, you lucky thing. The nice big one with mummy. And the small smelly one with daddy." Unsurprisingly, his daughter's response is "I want to go home to my real home."

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But a whingeing tone is never far from the surface. Any prejudices a female reader may have about men will be confirmed rather than confounded. Lott does not offer a rounded or enriching portrait of the male experience any more than Kureishi does - and he lacks Kureishi's sharpness. This novel is compelling, but one does not feel any the better for having read it.